The Spy Who Taxed Me

"Does no one think it strange that an American state hires a foreign company to spy on American citizens?"

Uncle Sam
The Spy Who Taxed Me
by Charles Glass
December 06, 2010

Everyone is a spy now. The state has always spied on its citizens, but the lens is turning the other way. For that, we are indebted to Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and the sources passing along military and diplomatic documents. This turnabout redresses the balance between government and public to a small extent, but the state's resources still outweigh ours. After all, the state uses our money to spy on us, and it has longer experience in keeping tabs on us. This vicious habit dates at least to the Espionage Act of 1917 that Woodrow Wilson used to watch and prosecute anyone who opposed his war in France's trenches.

Did the Espionage Act, which some politicians and journalists want to use to prosecute Julian Assange, uncover the Kaiser's spy network in the United States? Not exactly. The government used it to incarcerate socialists Eugene Debs and Kate Richards O'Hare and a film maker named Robert Goldstein, whose crime was to depict British atrocities against American colonists in his subversively titled 1917 epic The Spirit of '76. Government spying on American citizens went berserk with the post-war Red Scare and Palmer Raids. It expanded during World War II and the Cold War, when J. Edgar Hoover dispatched second-story men to ransack the tiny Socialist Workers Party's offices, follow journalists such as I. F. Stone, and plant microphones under Martin Luther King's bed. This led, lest we forget, to 1966's Freedom of Information Act and ostensible limits on what the Central Intelligence Agency could do within America's borders. Thanks to a loss of trust in government following Watergate, the Church and Pike Committees allowed the public to learn how domestic-surveillance programs such as COINTELPRO had violated their constitutional rights. But such "transparency" wouldn't last long.

Thanks to the investment of your taxes into modern electronic eavesdropping, the FBI's gumshoes don't have to get their hats wet to know what you are doing. Most of it is done from computer keyboards. The latest government program to keep an eye on you is "Hotwatch ," which tracks your credit-card purchases and frequent-flyer miles in the way Wikileaks revealed the State Department was asking American diplomats to do to their colleagues at the UN. Hotwatch does not require any judge to issue a court order­as the Constitution requires­to invade your financial privacy. It can even check, via supermarket loyalty cards, which vegetables and condoms you buy.

The Transport Security Agency collects nude photos of all air travelers for the masturbatory edification of its more eccentric employees. It hopes to extend this mandate to trains and ships. More ominously, the TSA targets those who criticize its behavior. A CNN journalist named Drew Griffin found himself on a TSA "watch list" of "domestic extremists" following his broadcasted criticisms of the agency. Journalists are attempting via the Freedom of Information Act to discover which other colleagues have earned the same accolade, so far without success. The FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendment Act of 2008 grants "the National Security Agency [NSA] virtually limitless power to spy on Americans' international phone calls and emails…[and] new power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans' international telephone calls and e-mails en masse, without a warrant, without suspicion of any kind, and with only very limited judicial oversight."

Homeland Security is funding the installation of closed-circuit cameras in American city centers to monitor suspicious activity that might be "dry runs" for terrorist attacks. Houston is planning to install two to three hundred cameras, which should allow the police to keep an eye on demonstrators if no one else. The FBI, meanwhile, has put the Tea Party under surveillance. In the spirit of these times, Pennsylvania's state Homeland Security Agency contracted out surveillance of its citizens. Interestingly, this lucrative contract's lucky recipient was an Israeli company called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response. (The Israelis have been watching the Palestinians' every movement in the occupied territories for so long that they are experts at observation.) Does no one think it strange that an American state hires a foreign company to spy on American citizens?

The government is watching you in more ways than I have space for, so it's little surprise that someone within the apparatus was outraged enough to expose the government to its overexposed citizens. Thanks to him, her, or them, we've been able to read what the military is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq and what America's representatives overseas are doing in our name. They read our mail, so we might as well read theirs. Government officials and their media apologists howl with fury and demand Julian Assange's arrest and execution, but we are expected to keep quiet when the government watches us. Let's face it­there are things worth watching. Our elected representatives, our diplomats, and our soldiers are our employees. We ought to know how they spend our money and whether they are disobeying the law, especially when it involves kidnapping and torture.

The population, whose long-term jobless are about to lose governmental financial assistance, is becoming restive. Its money is transferred to financial-service managers who produce nothing. Twenty percent of the federal budget goes to the Pentagon. This pays for the wars our soldiers must fight, the 700-plus bases and other facilities it maintains overseas, spying at home and abroad, and developing weapons that have long passed any positive function. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost more than a trillion dollars, which might have been better spent by the Americans who earned that money, or at least used for education, healthcare, and the increasingly poor underclass. The people are under siege by government and its primary beneficiaries among the arms makers and bankers, so someone must keep an eye on the masses for signs of resistance. Guess who pays for that? You do, sucker.

Noam Chomsky said recently that "one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population." Break the secrecy, and the population can at least see what is being done in its name. I don't know the government's public-relations budget, but it is probably fairly large. Every agency has a spokesperson whose task is to spin or conceal what those agencies are doing. It is interesting, once in a while, to see behind that obfuscation to the raw data.

It happened when the Iranian students who seized the U.S. Embassy in 1979 pieced together the thousands of documents the CIA and diplomats had shredded. They published more than forty volumes of diplomatic cables that revealed a concerted policy of subversion and contempt for democratic opposition to American-backed dictators in the Middle East. The "Den of Spies" books were the equivalent of today's Wikileaks revelations, and the U.S. government was as angry then as it is now that anyone had a peek at what it was saying and doing. When the journalist, teacher, and civil-rights worker William Worthy brought the volumes into Boston's Logan Airport in 1981, the CIA and FBI seized them. Worthy sued, and the courts awarded him his purloined documents and $16,000 compensation. (The books had been sold in Iranian bookshops, where thousands of copies had been sold. I bought a set at the same time Worthy did, but I donated mine to a London library.)

The Internet permits Wikileaks to make its documents available to the public without risking their seizure at an airport. The U.S. government is pursuing Julian Assange with more vigor than it did William Worthy. It has shut down his website where it can, and it is threatening to prosecute him under, you guessed it, 1917's Espionage Act. Those of us who are tired of being watched and would like to go on watching the watchers owe our support to Wikileaks.

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